Amazon's New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States
5 days ago by return2ozma to c/technology
They have enough money for generations of their children to live as untouchables. They don’t need to care about their kids.
Remember that Stargate SG1 episode where they find themselves into a huge underground facility that is under attack by external forces. Jack O'Neill accepts to pilot one of their drones to help defend the complex from a wave of bombers and is infuriated to learn that the attacker's bombers were manned while he believed they were unmanned.
spoiler
At the end it turns out the facility was actively poisoning the entire planet, threatening to wipe out all life and the "attackers" were simply the people of the rest of the world trying to stop it.
That is what the Amazon data center is to me.
always the fascist...
A key thing there is that the bunker dwellers were at least eugenicists if not outright Nazi analogues and they were deliberately killing everyone outside as untermensch, it wasn't just a callous side effect of their facility.
I need to watch it. I've never seen it. I'm too young I guess.
Not with that attitude LoL
It's not about "attitude" it's about thinking it through and finding a method of attack that would actually do damage that can't be repaired in under a week if not ignored completely.
That's right. Salt water it is.
Jet fuel melt steel beams.
"Jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams"...
Wait, it does not run on solar, even partially? JFC.
edit: yep.
Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
🤦
Does greed know no end in this country?
it does know an end. in fact, the end just pled guilty to stalking ending in death in new york.
It‘s universally known by now that new mega data centers are generally powered by gas. And it‘s the same everywhere in the world. Destroying them and prohibit exorbitant wealth are measures that are long overdue already. We genuinely do not need all that calculating power. Not for this high of a price.
No, we really don't.
7.65 GW × 24 hrs / 6 kW/m2/day = 30.6 km2 of just solar panels, just for this one data center
The solution isn't solar, the solution is don't build it
You realize they are for sifting through the massive amount of surveillance data using AI right? They aren’t for ChatGPT. They are for categorizing and watching every person on the planet 1984 style.
that's my biggest worry, more data centers won't lower the cost of LLM tokens.
The only reason they want so much compute power is to have AI agents watching and annotating everything flock cameras see.
not just license plate readers (a raspberry pi could handle that). but everything.
My paranoia is that in 5 years, if you protest, the police will come to arrest you with a long list of every "crime" you have committed: driving holding you phone, no seatbelt, a recipt flew out of your pockets... a long list of petty meaningless violations.
and they'll have that list for everyone.
They are already unpopular now. Wait till the pigs dive even deeper in popularity.
They might convince the general population that the first amendment is not worth exercising, and instead we all neet to contemplate military style resistance.
Nobody apparently wants to bring trouble to themselves as long as there is still anything left to hope for. However that calculus can change once the powers that be engineer a life even more glaringly worthless than it already is. Lots of people are quiet quitting or not having children already. That trend will accelerate even further.
Do you have a source for this?
Running an LLM is significantly less resource intensive than training it, and all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI.
They’re literally buying up all the computing resources so that we can’t get any.
We will all have to communicate though walled gardens on dumb tablets.
They can quickly summarize vast amounts of text looking for any “undesirable” patterns using LLMs.
We will all have to rent computing time from them.
This is the point, this has been the point for a long time, it’s just that LLMs were the perfect storm of “impressive to rubes” and “resource hungry”. Micron has already eliminated its consumer brand, Crucial. Hell, Peter Thiel (the Palantir guy) goes around giving talks about how “being against AI is the antichrist” just to make sure that all the remaining brainwashed sheep fall for the ruse.
This shit is not hard to see. They want to own our future entirely and they want us to pay them for the privilege.
Capitalism was a fucking mistake.
all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI
Amazon? Nah, it has commercial interest in this, not scientific*.
Also, MAGA is pushing this like crazy, and destroying the planet in the process. For the next 10 years there's by law practically no regulation wrt anything AI.
That said:
keep up the breakneck pace of US-American companies racing to create AGI more AI, or ELLM = even larger language models
This affects the whole world, esp. if other governments (looking at EU) simply swallow the narrative hook line sinker.
Fuck This Shit
* If you say they are chasing AGI you mean that they are willing to make decisions that will further that goal, not just further profits. And I do not believe that for one second.
This thing is 7.65GW. The largest solar array in the US is 900MW and uses 4600-5000 acres. The scale to do this on solar alone is bonkers, but not impossible.
You would need to at least 4x provision it which means a 30GW solar array, and 156,000 acres, before getting into battery storage for non sunny times.
It'd be nice to use some solar absolutely, but this is better suited to nuclear.
Edit: And if you aren't storing / over provision to store, then you still need the peak output from another source anyway and these things likely always run near peak as they are constantly in use, so the size of the non-solar source doesn't reduce, only its output during the sunny day time hours. So you end up with 7.65GW of natural gas still, but maybe they also build a 1GW solar farm on the side.
Nuclear power run by a publicly traded company worries me.
Because there will be shareholder value vs. safety trades.
Probably shouldn't be run by them i agree, but they could fund it and go into some agreement to purchase its power.
At that scale you aren't using batteries, you are pumping water into a hydroelectric dam.
At this scale everything is bonkers. The hoover damn is 2GW.
That severely limits where you can place it, probably more than solar. Now you need all that extra water, and height differential that can be at that scale.
And don't forget to vote for the lesser evil party that will allow amazon to build just a dozen of these enormous datacenters instead of even more
"Yet you live in society, curious."
I don't know, if you actively are reducing your shopping from amazon and try to stay away from their products, I wouldn't call you a hypocrite for criticising them. And many people now a days are doing just that, so you can't really assume right from the start that a person is being hypocritical.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
What the fuck? They looked at the world recently and said "yeah, climate change isn't as much of a problem as it was before"?!?
No, they looked at the blatant corruption from Fatboy McKiddieFiddlers regime and figured, "eh, what's the point of pretending to give a shit. No fucker has got the balls to stop us from fucking thing up."
They mean politically, they can get away with this now without blownack, they never gave one single shit about the climate
On one hand that sounds bad, but if that delivery driver is dropping off enough things in one run that would have been individual people driving to a store, does it balance out?
Maybe, but Amazon in particular will also bag/box every solitary thing. Not sure if it balances, but it's an interesting question when you put it that way.
Still, I expect they prioritize meeting service levels over fuel economy.
can we use some patriot missiles for something patriotic?
How do you think they're clearing the native residents off the land?
Net zero doesn’t mean lowering pollution btw. Net zero means essentially cancelling out any pollution by planting trees, buying carbon credits, etc. It’s possible to be the biggest polluter and also net zero as a company. If that actually helps the planet is another story.
Most "we plant a tree for every _____" things are just scams. They plant the trees, sometimes as monocrops that could never become a healthy forest, and usually without monitoring the trees or guaranteeing their survival into at least early-maturity.
Don't plankton mostly release that back into the atmosphere when they die though? Trees sequester it underground as roots and above ground as wood (assuming it doesnt burn, which is an increasingly ambitious assumption)
Yep, and many of them just never plant any trees at all.
Well, as long as trees magically suck pollution out of the atmosphere in extremely high numbers, and sequester it for at least a few million years, that should be fine
Otherwise, we're probably fucked.
In case it was not your intent to point this out with sarcasm, for anyone reading:
not all forests are created equal: new growth forests are simply not as good at long-term burial of carbon.
carbon sinks only work so long as the carbon stays sunk, so if a tree dies and rots before it's buried, all of that carbon just goes back to the atmosphere, except a lot of it is now methane, which is MANY times worse than CO2.
this means that it is possible for a poorly - managed tree to actually be an effective carbon source for the purpose of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink, since a single molecule of methane can do the damage of a hundred molecules of carbon dioxide.
the largest carbon sink on earth is not the forests, but the ocean, and that carbon only really has two ways out: back into the atmosphere, or buried at the bottom in the calcareous ooze. Now if you really want to understand how fucked we are, read up on the following:
- Carbonate Compensation Depth (see how it relates to the amount of calcareous ooze being buried in the ocean)
- Methane Clathrate Hydrate
- Permafrost Methane
i dont trees can safely do it fast enough. also its mostly co2 , pollution is a different matter. Also algae, phytoplankton make half of the carbon capture as well, a net benefit when they become marine snow and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
And we gotta be negative. Net 0 is a nice milestone on the way to build a future for our children.
BUT it was ALSO create THREE whole jobs so it's WORTH it!
I'm so glad I never procreated.
With any luck I'll croak before the worst effects of these decisions manifest.
Amazon: "but but but! we have over 50,000 electric delivery vans, and we sent Capt Kirk to space!"
These companies are all racing to dominate the market. Eventually one will win, largely through government contracts. Then all the infrastructure will be used to further propagandize, kill and spy on us.
looks like they are aiming for most govt contract= mass AI surveillance as a constant influx of profit, while they saw commercial use as a total failure, since nobody wants to pay for it, and the growing resentment against AI.
The company benefits by convincing investors that is still growing and innovating. If investors think they are still growing their stock prices go up. If their stock prices go up then they can use their stock as an asset to borrow against or as a form of payment in lieu of cash. Stock is particularly useful to a company as a medium of exchange because they can just make more. But they can only do that without tanking the value if people are buying, and they can only keep people buying if they think the price will go up, and the only thing the price will go up if they think the company is going to become more profitable in the future.
This is basically Cory Doctrow's argument in his latest book.
Fossil fuel companies. Waha natural gas prices are super depressed in that area so it would be a big boon to the pricing environment there.
Yay Texas the business-friendly state. As if billionaires aren’t raping the planet and all of us hard enough, the lone star state is always looking for way to pump their penises just a little bit bigger.
But the grid can’t handle EV or the “pollution” they create.
funnily the all the "grid can't handle all the EV charging" is just assuming everyone is going to fast charge the same time, when in reality most are just going to be using either level 1 overnight charging every night or fast charge for a way shorter time so very few people are doing that at the same time.
While this certainly could be true, I would say it's only that way because state and federal government refuse to invest in our aging energy grid.
with proper taxation and directing that towards upgrading the infrastructure, supporting it is absolutely possible.
More context:
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
“We’re being transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results,” Callahan continued. “Growth and sustainability don’t have to be in opposition — in fact, our results show they reinforce each other.”
That is so cynical.
The USA and its legislation (10 year moratorium on all AI regulation) is what changed.
The world is continuously and slowly going in the same direction since they "pledged". Nothing has changed there.
Slowly?
The number of hurricanes, floods, droughts, earthquakes and fires on all the news sources would indicate otherwise.
Still slow compared to MAGA
Holy Luigi!
We need Climate Action. How to nip this in the bud before they even start building the power plant. And not burning, or blowing up. That's bad for the world.
one time carbon cost vs decades of compound carbon interest.
I'll take the lump sum, please.
Right? That's my thing, look at airlines and their Razer thin margins. They just built this megastructure and can't operate any of it without completely depending on gas prices.
Even without the green aspects no one stopped to think about the return on investment of layering the entire place in solar? 5 years from now? 20?
But can you imagine if the datacenters also hoarded all the solar panel production capacity through 2028?
Although we would benefit from the dirt cheap panels from the bankruptcy auctions, while almost nobody has use for hbm memory chips
That was just talk
The red run deregulated Texas Oblast allowed this shit. Kiss the water supplies and eventually the local economy good-bye.
Almost every day I have a fight with my gf over her Amazon account. I told her we can not proceed with a meaningful relationship if she doesn't cancel it. Am I the crazy one?
Yes. The effect of one person's passive boycott is nothing. If you're serious enough to sabotage your own relationships over this, then perhaps focus instead on a greater boycott campaign, or actively pushing for legislation to actually make a difference.
Don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
Seconded. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” type shit. Pick your battles.
The effect of one person’s passive boycott is nothing.
This is some centrist capitalism-enabling shit. The sum of our individual efforts can amount to great things. Boycotts have been a great tool against fascism throughout history.
@Waffelmeister@lemmy.world is actually boycotting his relationship. I do not think it is wise for him to try to force her into submission rather than leading by a lifetime of example proving that one can get by just fine without Amazon and inspiring rather than coercing her to leave.
Honestly, this is more of a values disparity.
If two people have different values in some places in life, its normal to have adversity.
Just because it's a capitalist themed value, doesnt mean this person is being irrational imo.
Mostly agree with you, leading by example is the way. I am amazon free, but my fucking goddamn husband, absolutely pays for prime for television (and almost never watches much there, very annoying) but, I have gotten him to change his buying habits, and he doesnt buy off amazon no where near what he used to, its like once a year now. Ive have been successful in teaching him to at least think about where he spends money, and who it supports. It took some time sure.
Let's remind ourselves this is a company actively supporting genocide.
force her into submission
coercing her to leave
You conclude there's forcing and coercion from 2 sentences? I just see two people with apparently incompatible moral values about consumption. I don't see any forcing or coercion. I think it's a very valid reason. If he has or is willing to put patience into the relationship is also a decision he has to take.
Yes, wtf man?
Imho there are different aspects to this: are they binge buying useless stuff on Amazon constantly, feeding into mindless consumerism? are there more ethical alternatives available?
If someone uses Amazon for something they can't find anywhere else, or that the alternative costs so much more they can't afford it, then I understand. If they are just a mindless consumer and they do nothing to change that, they lose my respect.
At the same time, if that is a reason you are considering to break up with someone, imo it tells your relationship is not very solid to start with.
If they are just a mindless consumer and they do nothing to change that, they lose my respect.
god I am like this too. I met a woman (on disability no less, so cash strapped) who ordered so much goddamn shit from temu, it was taking over her house. She then flipped on the latest reality "love" based TV show, and I did not make a friend that day. Got the hell outta there whew
Don't lose your righteous principles over a woman. Especially since she is your gf, not a wife.
It is safe to say im done with amazon deleting my account now I will not support them anymore I worked there and saw how bad workers are treated and used to order stuff from them often im done with them period.
Everything but run them on renewable energy.
Papa trump and his minions need their money
Maybe when Trump is dead and gone, they’ll switch to solar. Solar’s gotta be MUCH cheaper for them in the long run anyway, and frees them of ties to industries known for being exploitative.
Call Johnny Silverhand.
Trying to re-use 7.65GW of excess heat would be a monumental task of it's own, but at a smaller scale, it works well. Things like a smaller datacenter heating the pool nearby etc. They should at least be trying to reuse as much as possible, pipe it to nearby things.
First coming to mind would be using to store heat in sand batteries. Heat water for swimming pools makes sense as well. Perhaps use it to dehydrate sludges from waste waters.
It's just a matter of imagination.
Its just that its a lot. Like 8.5% of the entire Texas ERCOT grid at peak during its last peak in August.
There is a paradox which I can't name now that states that every time there are advancements capable of solving scarcity problems instead of ending the issue new uses for the solution are come up with and what became plentiful gets stressed again.
That much excess heat is energy. An immense amount of it. Maybe use it to smelt scrap or process artificial diamonds.
The matter at hand is, for a change, excess when it is usually the opposite.
Until it goes dark, like fibre...
Anything from futurism.com should be immediately questioned.
Besides the US military, I'm sure.
it's in texas though.
now all of a sudden we care about texas? what goes on in texas is as important to me as the affairs of a random tiktok influencer.
we're fucked no matter if this data center is built or not.
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It doesn't need to be so, the asshole billionaires just don't give a single fuck about anyone but themselves. They don't even care about their kids.
save